Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Stay with me on this one. The meta-humor is thick and forbidding, and those unfamiliar with the reams of back story may not get it. (I'm a little bit outside of this culture—that's right, I'm, unbelievably, not geeky enough—so I had to do some research myself.)

Most of you should know about leetspeak and gamerspeak and the horrible abbreviations people use and abuse online. I'm talking about things like:

LOL = I'm laughing out loud!

OMG = Oh my God!

ROTFLMAO = I'm rolling on the floor, laughing my ass off!

etc.

The aforementioned abuse gave rise to leetspeaking haxorz (hackers ... actually "h4x0rz" is probably the truly leet way to type it) to start mocking such abusers by creating things like:

teh = "The," but since this common typo appears so frequently online, it's funny to put it in deliberately ("Teh book Babymouse: Rockstar r0x0rz teh s0x0rz," etc.)

Then you have a whole school of gamerspeak going on, brought about by those multiplayer online shooters where fellow players can type messages to each other. (Nowadays, I guess, everyone can talk to each other on headsets.) So you have things like:

im in ur base, killing ur d00dz = while you were busy doing something else in the game, I infiltrated your seemingly secure fortress, and I am now in the process of slaughtering all of your reserve units, and there's little you can do to stop it

OK. Still with me? Now, you've got your weird Photoshop art, some of which is little more than a funny photo of an animal with a weird caption. Such as this famous owl. From this came the LOLcats. People started captioning cat photos, and often uploaded them all for others to see on Saturday (Caturday). So some geniuses who saw this ridiculous photo:

Another maniac, named Adam Koford, decided to spend a good portion of his life in creating a faux-Krazy-Kat-era comic strip called "The Original Laugh-Out-Loud Cats." It stars two hobo cats, and plays off the LOLcats meme. It's quite brilliant, but the most disturbing thing is just how good Koford's technique is. He apparently makes his living as an illustrator and does work with American Greetings, but I'm here to say:

EDITORS—SIGN ADAM KOFORD TO A BOOK DEAL.

The man is talented and funny, and he should be getting more than the $20 for which he sells each LOLcats strip.